Taiwan semiconductor firms will see major revenue boosts from the global cryptocurrency mining craze in 2018, as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has landed sizable orders from Bitmain, China's leading Bictoin ASIC designer, for fabricating mining chips, while Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and TSMC-affiliated Global Unichip have shared the backend packaging and testing orders, according to industry sources.

At the moment, China's Bitmain, Canaan Creative, and Ebang Communication are the world's top-3 suppliers of Bitcoin mining solutions in terms of shipments, with Bitmain alone commanding a 70% share of the global market for such miners.

Bitmain's orders are enough to occupy 90% of TSMC's ASIC foundry capacity during off-peak season, with the remaining 10% booked by Canaan Creative. Bitmain's orders amount to 100,000 wafers monthly at TSMC, serving as a significant driver for the foundry house's revenue growth in 2018, the sources indicated.

Meanwhile, ASE and Global Unichip are also ready to fulfill orders from the two China customers for backend services. In addition, Taiwan suppliers of graphic cards including Asustek, Micro-Star International (MSI) and Gigabyte are also expected to benefit from the brisk market demand for such cards to support GPU-based mining machines in the first quarter of 2018, and they are moving to raise quotes for such cards, the sources added.

Whole line of parasites formed to participate in transforming useful energy into shit.

Development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit . . . the speculators... “On these grounds” reactionary, petty-bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism dream of going back to “free”, “peaceful”, and “honest” competition.

The native HDR pixel concept based on a parallel electron and hole collection for, respectively, a low signal level and a high signal level is particularly well-suited for this performance challenge. The theoretical performance of this pixel is modeled and compared to alternative HDR pixel architectures. This concept is proven with the fabrication of a 3.2 μm pixel in a back-side illuminated (BSI) process including capacitive deep trench isolation (CDTI). The electron-based image uses a standard 4T architecture with a pinned diode and provides state-of-the-art low-light performance, which is not altered by the pixel modifications introduced for the hole collection. The hole-based image reaches 750 kh+ linear storage capability thanks to a 73 fF CDTI capacitor. Both images are taken from the same integration window, so the HDR reconstruction is not only immune to the flicker issue but also to motion artifacts.

Windows 10 will be upgraded to new Polaris release that will support only 64bit applications from Windows store.

According to Windows Central, Microsoft will continue to offer the current version of Windows 10 that does support legacy apps natively even after Polaris is released. But the idea is to position it as an OS for power users or gamers, not the general public. We’ll see how that goes.

Idea is to offer Polaris on mainstream PCs and Windows 10 with Win32 application support on high-end machines aimed at professionals, gamers, and folks that need support for legacy software or newer games and programs that simply aren’t compatible with UWP apps.

So, more fragmentation first, next will be only this version on all retail desktops and notebooks and after this killing of Windows by forced upgrade where you can install unsigned applications from any site other than Microsoft.

Intel will release updated chips with built-in mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities later this year. The announcement was made by chief executive Brian Krzanich during the company's fourth quarter earnings call, and follows flawed patches by Intel and Microsoft that caused random rebooting issues on older and newer CPUs

Actually it is really impossible to make core architecture changes until you plan it ahead, 2-3 years ahead.